In her 2010 memoir Tales from a Mountain Metropolis, Quynh Dao – who was 15 on the fall of Saigon in 1975 – describes returning to Dalat, a metropolis in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, on the finish of the struggle. The North Vietnamese Military (NVA) had looted her household’s dwelling and made bonfires of their books and magazines:
There have been a whole lot of problems with Life journal, Paris-Match, Reader’s Digest, father’s lifetime assortment of books, the comics we youngsters learn … the simmering hearth devoured the pages slowly, absolutely, from the perimeters of the pages to the spines.
A number of weeks later, the NVA evicted Dao’s household. Escaping Vietnam by boat in 1979, Dao fled to a refugee camp in Malaysia, after which to Australia as one among thousands and thousands of ‘boat individuals’. By then, South Vietnam, the nation by which she had been born and raised, not existed.
The misperception that the Vietnam Conflict was fought between Vietnam and the US largely persists. However there have been two Vietnams: the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam), every with allies drawn alongside Chilly Conflict divisions. As of 31 January 1975, South Vietnam was recognised by 95 international locations, whereas North Vietnam was recognised by 65. Official US figures file 254,256 South Vietnamese killed and 783,602 wounded in motion through the struggle, greater than 5 occasions the variety of US casualties. As these statistics solely cowl 1960 to 1974, the true determine is unquestionably a lot increased. South Vietnam had by far the best casualty fee of all of the allies however this reality is now typically forgotten – together with the very existence of the nation itself.
Burning books
For the historian of South Vietnam, texts and paperwork are an issue. One of many first acts after the autumn of Saigon in 1975 was the burning of books on the Khai Tri publishing home in Le Loi road in Saigon, because the communist authorities focused publishers, instructional establishments, and bookshops within the former South. The Catholic priest André Gelinas reported that lots of the 80,000 books held on the Alexander of Rhodes Centre in Saigon have been burned between 1975 and 1977. Boi Tran Huynh, the daughter of the homeowners of South Vietnam’s second largest bookshop in Bien Hoa, recalled how:
After 1975, all of the books have been confiscated and brought away by the federal government, together with all of the textbooks of biology, arithmetic, physics, chemistry, all of the dictionaries and you already know issues that aren’t ideological. Arithmetic is arithmetic whether or not you’re communist or capitalist, Russian or American. They got here in vehicles and took all the things away.
Some 400 South Vietnamese writers, poets, and journalists have been despatched to re-education camps in June 1975. Books and journals that have been judged to be reactionary have been banned on 20 August with the prolonged listing of banned works additional expanded in March 1976 and Might 1977.
However the destruction was not solely carried out by the communist authorities. Many South Vietnamese households burned, destroyed, or in any other case disposed of images and paperwork in an try to cover their identities. In his essay assortment Fragrance Desires, the Vietnamese-American author Andrew Lam (whose father was a normal within the South Vietnamese army) remembers how, aged 11, he adopted his mom’s directions to take away ‘photos from album pages, diplomas from glass frames, movie reels from metallic canisters, letters from desk drawers’ earlier than setting them on hearth. By the point he had completed, ‘the mementoes of three generations had changed into ashes’.
Refugees
The lack of images, id papers, letters, and different memorabilia was compounded by the refugee exodus within the twenty years after the struggle. The motion was one of the seen mass migrations of the late twentieth century. A 1990 report ready by Stephen Denney for the Legal professionals Committee for Human Rights famous that
6.5 million individuals within the former South have been compromised on account of their household associations. After the struggle, a million individuals have been interned in re-education camps, one other million have been forcibly despatched to ‘New Financial Zones’ in beforehand uninhabited rural areas, whereas free speech and motion have been curtailed. The postwar authorities discriminated towards three outlined teams: those that have been related to the previous South Vietnamese authorities; the ethnic Chinese language (who, from 1976, have been compelled to register as such); and Amerasians, the kids of Vietnamese ladies and American personnel.
Greater than two million individuals left Vietnam within the twenty years after the struggle, and the plight of the boat individuals acquired international protection. The worldwide response was unprecedented, involving main conferences held on the UN in Geneva in 1979 and 1989, and the resettlement of South Vietnamese refugees in 50 international locations worldwide. The UN recorded 839,228 Vietnamese arrivals at camps operated by the UN Excessive Commissioner for Refugees between 1975 and 1997, although this quantity doesn’t embrace the 134,000 who have been evacuated to the US in 1975, the 263,000 who fled to the Folks’s Republic of China in 1978-79, and the 623,509 who left below the Orderly Departure Program in 1979-97.
Most refugees left Vietnam with out documentation. Many drowned within the Mekong delta whereas making an attempt to achieve the coast. Individuals who lived in riverine and coastal communities in southern Vietnam described floating corpses washing up on riverbanks or seashores within the postwar years. Most have been these of girls and kids, and, as they carried no id papers, their households couldn’t be notified. They have been buried in unmarked graves.
Escapes from Vietnam have been organized in secrecy as a result of individuals didn’t wish to draw the eye of the authorities or implicate members of the family. Alongside these escapes have been government-sponsored departures by which the brand new Vietnamese authorities was concerned with abroad crime syndicates in organising the trafficking of refugees, charging them a median of $2,000 in gold and confiscating their homes and items. This semi-official technique of escape was a type of state-sanctioned expulsion. Refugees have been promised secure passage, however most drowned. The entire variety of refugee deaths stays unknown, however most estimates counsel that 500,000 individuals died at sea. Many boat individuals imagine that for each boat that made it, one didn’t and that a million individuals perished within the South China Sea.
In memoriam
The loss of life toll of the exodus, the disappearance of so many, and the absence of human stays have led to ambiguous and unresolved types of grieving and mourning within the Vietnamese diaspora. Nothing now stays of the good community of camps that supplied refuge to thousands and thousands of Indochinese refugees within the postwar years, apart from Galang Refugee Camp in Indonesia’s Riau archipelago and the ruins of Bidong Refugee Camp in Malaysia. Memorials to the camps have been unveiled in each Galang and Bidong in 2005. Each memorials bore the identical inscription commemorating the boat individuals ‘who perished on the way in which to freedom’ and have been the product of fund-raising efforts by the Vietnamese diaspora in Australia, North America, and Europe. Designed by the Archive of Vietnamese Boat Folks in Melbourne, and carved by Indonesian stonecutters, the memorials resembled massive tombstones. Nonetheless, after the Hanoi authorities complained that the memorials ‘denigrated the dignity of Vietnam’, each the Indonesian and Malaysian governments yielded and ordered their destruction. Regardless of protests, the Bidong memorial was destroyed in October 2005 and the Galang memorial was eliminated by 2008.
Oral historical past
The story of those memorials demonstrates a tangible effort by the South Vietnamese diaspora to recollect, whereas their destruction exhibits that the Vietnamese state stays delicate in regards to the reminiscence of South Vietnam and its refugees. However South Vietnam has an enormous, international diaspora – one that’s more and more engaged within the reminiscence of the struggle. Whereas the destruction of cultural artefacts signifies that a lot was misplaced through the postwar years, new oral historical past archives are being created. Within the US collections reminiscent of ‘Viet Tales: Vietnamese American Oral Historical past Undertaking’ on the College of California and the Vietnamese American Heritage Basis oral historical past interview assortment at Rice College comprise a whole lot of oral testimonies. In Australia, oral historical past initiatives on Vietnamese veterans and the second era of Vietnamese Australians created in 2013-14 and 2018-22 are preserved within the Nationwide Library of Australia. They embrace an account by Nguyen Van Luyen, who was a 22-year-old armour officer when he was badly wounded in motion in 1974. Interviewed in 2013, he remembered: ‘We have been combating in dangerous circumstances, with no assist … I’m pleased with what we did as a result of we nonetheless fought on, we solely stopped once we have been ordered to take action by President Duong Van Minh.’ Vu Van Bao, a Chinook pilot who had simply turned 27 when the struggle ended, recalled how: ‘We, the South, we simply defended ourselves. We didn’t go as much as the North. We have been combating but additionally constructing our nation.’ Thanh, who didn’t wish to be recognized by her full title, is a former captain within the Ladies’s Armed Forces Corps. ‘Annually, I return to Vietnam to go to invalid soldier brothers which have and are nonetheless dwelling in excessive hardship in our dwelling nation’, she said. ‘These are individuals who have misplaced part of their our bodies on the battlefield … I all the time consider my place of birth … It’s the ache that makes you keep in mind.’
Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen is Professor of Historical past at Monash College. Her books embrace South Vietnamese Troopers: Reminiscences of the Vietnam Conflict and After (Bloomsbury, 2024).
